What is the Difference between Web Design and Web Development?

If you own a business, you should be familiar with using a website as a means of promoting and increasing your brand awareness, because nowadays, people in the business world cannot ignore the importance of using a website for their business. With a website, you can help your customers with more information about your website and thus, lead them to believe that your business is reliable and understandable. Therefore, there shouldn’t be more questions about whether or not we need a website to build a business. If you are a business owner, and you are going to build a website, you might need to hire web designers and/or web developers to help you build the site like you want. The problem is for some people, the boundaries between web designers and web developers are blurred. This makes many people think that both of them are actually interchangeable, which is not true.

It is true that a web designer might need to understand how to do basic code and a web developer needs to learn basic understandings about design. However, their jobs are actually not the same. In fact, the role of each is completely different from the other. If you want to know more about the differences between the two, you can keep reading the following point.

Web Design

The easiest way to understand web designers is just like thinking about people who transform an idea, or a story, into a visually appealing design, and use their layout to build the user experience throughout the whole website. Not only thinking about making a good design, but they also need to think about how to create the best user experience possible and how to provide a welcoming environment for the user. This is because a proper design strategy wasn’t applied into the early stages of the project. Because of this strategy, many people rate web designers at the same level of web developers, since the development cannot be truly appreciated by the user.

To know the difference between web designers and web developers, we should understand the main roles of each, as follows:

Working with software tools, such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, or Sketch to build the final layout design of the website

Have good skills in graphic design and logo design

Understand how to design for user experience and identify the simplest approach possible to attain the desired function. This includes the layout, buttons, images, and the general format of the website.

Keeping up with the latest design trends is also a part of a web designer’s jobs. Besides, a web designer needs to keep the design consistency that is made popular from other web giant companies, such as Google, and Facebook, etc. since using already familiar web designs to the users’ eyes would make the website environment and interface easier to navigate and use.

Keep in mind with the branding of the website, color palettes to be used, and the typography and readability of the website.

Responsible for the prototyping design

Carry out the graphic design of the product catalog

Carry out various activities of advertising design

Web Development

Different from web designers; web developers turn the designs into a live website by using web languages and software tools to develop the design and the functionality of a website. Remember that web developers are further split into two sub-categories; front-end developers, and back-end developers. A front end developers should at least master three main languages; Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and JavaScript (JS). This is because these languages will enable developers to create a full-fledged website, from the main design layout to inserting images, applying different types of typography and font families, implementing animations, the flow of different pages, form interfaces, and more.

On the other hand, a back-end developer will control the server data and requests. Generally, if the data contains dynamic data, a back-end service would be required.

However, commonly, a web developer will be responsible for some main roles, such as:

Building the actual interface through which a user interacts with the website. This interface is built by front-end developers using HTML, CSS, and JS languages.

To fasten the process of development, front-end developers can use styling preprocessors, Javascript libraries and frameworks.

In order to implement a dynamic website and submit all the required data on the server and databases, the front-end developers should provide the markup design to backend developers.

Create the backbone of the website using languages such as PHP and MySQL.

Use IDEs to code and build the structure of the website

Furthermore, in order to keep a history of the previous builds, web developers also use versioning tools. With these tools, you can quickly and effortlessly move back to a previous “unbroken” version if required to do so.

Conclusion

It is clear that in terms of the job’s roles, the designers and developers are always playing an indispensable role. However, there are some clear distinctions between the two, for example designers are mainly responsible for using their own aesthetic knowledge with a variety of tools to design a beautiful page. They are also responsible for providing the first impression for customers. On the other hand, web developers do not really focus on the design, , they only focus on building clean code very much and if they can turn the design into reality. Under normal circumstances, web developers receive the design if the page is from the web designer and then use front-end development technology to encode these pages.